Mark Twain Quotes

The more I know people, the more I love my dog.

Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.

So far as I am able to judge, nothing has been left undone, either by man or nature, to make India the most extraordinary country that the sun visits on his rounds. Nothing seems to have been forgotten, nothing overlooked.

The house was as empty as a beer closet in premises where painters have been at work.

Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself.

We wish to learn all the curious, outlandish ways of all the different countries, so that we can "show off" and astonish people when we get home. We wish to excite the envy of our untraveled friends with our strange foreign fashions which we can't shake off.

When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.

The Christian Bible is a drug store. It´s contents have remained the same but the medical practice continues. For 1,800 years these changes were slight--scarcely noticeable... The dull and ignorant physician day and night, and all the days and all the nights, drenched his patient with vast and hideous doses of the most repulsive drugs to be found in the store´s stock. He kept him religion sick for eighteen centuries, and allowed him not a well day during all that time.

Learning softeneth the heart and breedeth gentleness and charity.

When your watch gets out of order you have choice of two things to do: throw it in the fire or take it to the watch-tinker. The former is the quickest.

We have infinite trouble in solving man-made mysteries; it is only when we set out to discover "the secret of God" that our difficulties disappear.

Barring that natural expression of villainy which we all have, the man looked honest enough.

I respect a man who knows how to spell a word more than one way.

Carlyle said 'a lie cannot live.' It shows that he did not know how to tell them.

A man's character may be learned from the adjectives which he habitually uses in conversation.

Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest.

No real gentleman will tell the naked truth in the presence of ladies.

We catched fish, and talked, and we took a swim now and then to keep off sleepiness. It was kind of solemn, drifting down the big still river, laying on our backs looking up at the stars, and we didn’t ever feel like talking loud, and it warn’t often that we laughed, only a kind of low chuckle. We had mighty good weather, as a general thing, and nothing ever happened to us at all, that night, nor the next, nor the next.

Reputation is a hall-mark: it can remove doubt from pure silver, and it can also make the plated article pass for pure.

The Church worked hard at it night and day during nine centuries and imprisoned, tortured, hanged, and burned whole hordes and armies of witches, and washed the Christian world clean with their foul blood. Then it was discovered that there was no such thing as witches, and never had been. One doesn't know whether to laugh or to cry. Who discovered that there was no such thing as a witch - the priest, the parson? No, these never discover anything.

It takes some little time to accept and realize the fact that while you have been growing old, your friends have not been standing still, in that matter.

As soon as a man recognizes that he has drifted into age, he gets reminiscent. He wants to talk and talk; and not about the present or the future, but about his old times. For there is where the pathos of his life lies - and the charm of it. The pathos of it is there because it was opulent with treasures that are gone, and the charm of it is in casting them up from the musty ledgers and remembering how rich and gracious they were.

To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin That makes calamity of so long life.

Love is not a product of reasonings and statistics. It just comes-none knows whence-and cannot explain itself.

It's a good thing for a dog to have fleas; keeps his mind off being a dog.

Apparently there is nothing that cannot happen today.

The laws of Nature, that is to say the laws of God, plainly made every human being a law unto himself, we must steadfastly refuse to obey those laws, and we must as steadfastly stand by the conventions which ignore them, since the statutes furnish us peace, fairly good government, and stability, and therefore are better for us than the laws of God, which would soon plunge us into confusion and disorder and anarchy if we should adopt them.

If I had more time, I would have written less.

I don't like to commit myself about heaven and hell - you see, I have friends in both places.

One day man by the slow processes of evolution shall develop into something really fine and high - some billions of years hence, say.

We have not the reverent feeling for the rainbow that the savage has, because we know how it is made. We have lost as much as we gained by prying into that matter.

Golden rule: Made of hard metal so it could stand severe wear, it not being known at that time that butter would answer.

The art of prophecy is very difficult, especially with respect to the future.

The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin.

When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don't mean utterly, but kill most of them--then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are far apart.

Do one thing every day you don't want to do.

Who knows, he may grow up to be President someday, unless they hang him first!" Aunt Polly about Tom Sawyer

Nothing is so ignorant as a man's left hand, except a lady's watch.

There's always a hole in theories somewhere if you look close enough.

There is more real pleasure to be gotten out of a malicious act, where your heart is in it, than out of thirty acts of a nobler sort.

God was left out of the Constitution but was furnished a front seat on the coins of the country.

Inherited ideas are a curious thing, and interesting to observe and examine.

When congress is in session no American is safe.

We like to read about rich people in the newspapers; the papers know it, and they do their best to keep this appetite liberally fed.

One of the brightest gems in the New England weather is the dazzling uncertainty of it.

To one in sympathy with nature, each season, in its turn, seems the loveliest.

Work is a necessary evil to be avoided.

Drop this mean and sordid and selfish devotion to the saving of your shabby little souls, and hunt up something to do that's got some dignity to it! Risk your souls! Risk them in good causes; then if you lose them, why should you care? Reform!